I did the same thing you are doing, and my advice would be to get a relator to help you initially. There are a few on this board. They handled the first three questions and the last for me. There will be a price, but for one month's rent, I feel like they more than paid for themself. They had professional pictures taken and met with prospective tenants, and showed the place, so I didn't have to. I have only had one tenant, so I am very much a rookie, but I think getting help from a professional initially is a good idea.

There are several screening tools out there, and I used TransUnion.

As far as invoices, I don't do anything like that and just have the tenant send me money via Zelle every month.

The key is finding the best tenant possible. I have only had one, and they have been great so far. They pay on time, let me know when things break, and don't really bother me outside of that. They just recently renewed and asked to drop the rent by $100/month, and I gladly accepted. It would cost me money to find another tenant, and there is no guarantee that I could rent it again at a higher rate. I figured the $1200 difference was worth it.

I change the air filters myself so that I can get inside and take a look inside to see how everything looks.